Neil Young in Nashville, Pondering Mortality

By JON PARELES

Published: August 20, 2005

A lanky man in an antique-style pewter-gray suit and a gaucho hat stood onstage Thursday night at Ryman Auditorium, the hallowed country-music landmark that was the longtime home of the Grand Ole Opry. An old-fashioned painted backdrop was behind him; an old guitar was in his hands.

The guitar, he told the audience, had belonged to Hank Williams, who was fired from the Grand Ole Opry in 1952. Neil Young, the man holding the guitar, said he was happy that Williams's guitar was returning to the Ryman stage. And then he sang ''This Old Guitar,'' a quietly touching song from his coming album, ''Prairie Wind,'' that observes, ''This old guitar ain't mine to keep/ It's mine to play for a while.''

Thursday night Mr. Young began a two-night stand at the Ryman Auditorium that was a tangle of new and old, of remembrance and reinvention. With him were more than two dozen musicians: a band, backup singers (including his wife, Pegi), a horn section, a string section, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and Emmylou Harris. They were assembled for what would be the only performances of all the songs on ''Prairie Wind'' (Reprise), due for release on Sept. 20.

The musicians were costumed like old-time country performers, in suits and modest coordinated dresses, but they weren't playing old-time country music. A film crew directed by Jonathan Demme, who made the Talking Heads concert film ''Stop Making Sense'' as well as ''The Silence of the Lambs,'' was shooting for a documentary scheduled for a February release.

A day before the concerts, Mr. Young took a break for an interview between rehearsals that had been running 12 hours a day. ''We're doing 10 songs with 20, sometimes 30, musicians on them,'' he said. ''I pick musicians who are in the moment, and when you get guys who are in the moment to try and recreate some other moment, that's a hell of a lot of work to do. They can't even remember what they played.''

Memory is central to both ''Prairie Wind'' and Mr. Young's other project, the long-postponed release of music from his archives that is to begin next year. ''It's a long road behind me,'' he sings in ''The Painter,'' which opens the album. ''It's a long road ahead.''

''Prairie Wind'' is a collection of plain-spoken songs about family, faith, home, music, the passage of time and the wide-open Canadian landscape where Mr. Young grew up. Like the other albums he has recorded in Nashville -- including the best-selling album of his career, ''Harvest,'' from 1972 -- it looks toward American roots, and its 10 songs amble from country twang to bluesy harmonica to Memphis soul horns. There's a fond, loose-limbed honky-tonk tribute to Elvis and ballads that straightforwardly offer love and loyalty; the title song, particularly onstage, turned into an incantation as expansive as its chorus: ''Prairie wind blowin' through my head.''

The lyrics are infused with feelings of mortality, and are full of benedictions and farewells. While making the album, Mr. Young, 59, was being treated for a brain aneurysm, a swelling in a blood vessel. He alternated recording sessions in Nashville with surgery and hospitalization in New York City.

In March, Mr. Young had experienced blurred vision at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where he performed with the Pretenders. ''I saw a lot of doctors real fast,'' he said. The aneurysm was diagnosed, but he had already made plans to begin recording in Nashville, and he did a week of sessions -- finishing the first three songs on the album -- before returning to New York for surgery.

''The recording studio is one of the few places where I feel completely at home,'' he said. ''I felt like staying in there. I wanted to get whatever I had on my mind into music.'' He wrote quickly -- sometimes completing a song in just 15 or 20 minutes -- and placed the songs on the album in the order they were written and recorded, as he had with ''Greendale,'' the rock opera he released in 2003. The songs on ''Prairie Wind'' don't have a narrative, as ''Greendale'' did, but they continue to explore Mr. Young's fascination with the changes and continuity of generations.

''When you're in your 20's, then you and your world are the biggest thing, and everything revolves around what you're doing,'' Mr. Young said. ''Now I realize I'm a leaf floating along on the water on top of some river. That's where I'm at.''

The lyrics are filled with reminiscences. ''It's about where I'm from and where our family's from and where the world is going,'' Mr. Young said, ''and what it used to be like when my grandfather was a kid, and what they remember and what I remember them telling me about, the things that they saw that no one will ever see again.''

Like Bruce Springsteen's current album, ''Devils & Dust,'' Mr. Young's new album also ponders religion. The album's most striking song, ''No Wonder,'' is a series of elusive, overlapping narratives and contrasting musical sections, united by the recurring image of a church. And its final song, ''When God Made Me,'' sets a series of questions to a hymnlike melody: ''Did He think there was only one way to be close to Him?'' Perhaps by coincidence, the studio where ''Prairie Wind'' was made, Masterlink, was once a church and, during the Civil War, a Confederate morgue. (More recently it was Monument Studios, where Roy Orbison recorded throughout his career.) Ryman Auditorium itself was built in 1892 as a gospel tabernacle.